Fire to Burn Cold
by Sage and Snape
Summary: Snape's apprentice reflects upon the life that led him to where he is now.Particularly,he reflects upon the pain of his past and the pain of his future as it relates to Voldie and SS.Warning mature themes. Can go with God of the underworld
1. Chapter 1

Fire to Burn Cold

Irony.

That is all that I have to say.

My life is supreme irony.

After what has been done to me, my anger burns like fire. I stillflare in disbelief every time I think about it. But, perhaps I should step back and explain. You'll have to forgive me, the fire inside gets me carried away, and I try to vent it to keep myself from combusting.

To other purebloods, my family name brands me as a blood traitor or illegitimate - either way it makes me no better than a mudblood to the others of my kind. I have no pureblood last name, and that is what leads others to speculate why I do not. How can I choose to defend myself? I cannot, to most, because that would mean I would have to confess that my father was a Death Eater. _Was_, before he was killed, killed by the Dark Lord.

So, you see, herein lies the rub. Should I say to those conservative purebloods that my father was an inept Death Eater who was murdered for his failures, and my mother most certainly did not want me to share the same fate, so she hid us and hid my father's identity from me? Surely not. Not if I value my life. Should I say to the Muggle-lovers that y_es_ I am a pureblood, and _yes_ my father was a Death Eater, but he was a _good_ Death Eater?

My former school, Scyon Private Academy of Magic, may just have well been Scyon Pureblood Academy of Magic, but that would be politically distasteful, wouldn't it? I was the mudblood there. I was the one that was targeted much more ruthlessly than Hermione Granger was targeted, for the same reason, at Hogwarts by Draco Malfoy. Only in a school where everyone, including the majority of the Professors and staff, hold the same ideals, nobody cared what happened to me. Me, the filth of pureblooded wizardry.

Five against one. One eleven year-old boy who had no idea why he was so hated. One eleven year-old boy that learned quickly how to fight back. After months of physical damage from curses, hexes, and physical assaults, I finally managed to give some back. I had given up on the idea that someone would stop them, that someone would fight back for me. Merlin forbid a teacher would risk his career for the blood traitor! I knew I was alone. I knew I was responsible for my own protection. When I sent those fiveto the hospital wing, slashed up and bleeding, after they had hit me with numerous, more undetectable curses, I was punished. Nobody did anything to the five of them for the months of torture they inflicted upon me, or even for the Cruciatus they cast upon me that very day.

The eleven year-old boy was told that he was lying scum.

"If they attacked you, then why don't you have cuts teeming with blood and welts all over? Why would they look so much worse than you? You lying little whelp."

Yeah, sure.

I tried to defend myself then. I pleaded. Then I yelled. I stood up for myself, and the unfairness of it all, until the beating I received left me unable to stand up for myself any longer. The Professor didn't believe me when I told him that the five of them could be choosey on what they cast upon me. They could be careful not to leave any overt signs of what they did to me. Could I, against the five of them, have been selective in what I cast upon them to keep them off of me?

It was no excuse. Not to them. Not that they even believed me for a minute.Not that they would have done anything to stop it if they had believed me.

Years of this. Years of being punished for protecting myself and it gradually got worse - if that is even believable. It gradually got worse, and I gradually got more ruthless in defending myself. I then had an eleven year-old brother in school to protect. I would not let them torture him while they held me back, making me watch as he screamed, and not try to do anything to prevent it. The fights, or ambushes rather, got worse until one day when I sent all five of them to the hospital wing with gaping wounds, compound fractures, and intense spell damage.

I had enough.

I was a druid then. I had learned how to manipulate power in ways it took regular wizards a lifetime to achieve. I learned how to use my druidic powers to my advantage in the altercations. I was faster. I was more used to pain than they. I could focus my spells more despite my state, because my mind was disciplined.

Not that I could do the same damage to any adult wizard, let alone five of them, because I could not, but against five children I could.

I was expelled. I was finally released from the hell that was my life. It could not get worse, I told myself. My mother was dead, dead by my own hand. She had asked me to end it for her, but I'll have to live with the fact that I was looking into her eyes and watched the magic drain right out of them. True, the only other alternative for her would have been much more painful and long, but I still have nightmares.

Again, I digress. So, I was expelled for being impulsive, violent, incorrigable, and insubordinate.Very colorful, no?

You might ask yourself why this wasn't more devastating for me. How could I expect to secure a profession? The answer is quite simple really.

The Headmaster of Scyon knew the truth of the matter. He knew what was happening to me. He knew why I was forced to resort to such brutal tactics. He knew I was being discriminated against in the worst way. He couldn't do anything for me while I was at the school because of political reasons. He would most assuredly lose his job. All he could do was find me a new school and an opportunity for me to pursue my intellectual endeavors elsewhere. For me to pursue Potions elsewhere.

I went to Hogwarts. He was friends with the great Albus Dumbledore from the days of Grindelwald.

There I met Potions master Severus Snape and made a rather lack-luster first impression. It was rather mutual. He thought I was another impulsive, undisciplined, rule-breaking, spoiled child. I thought he was a cold, vindictive, pompous, nasty, git.

I was sorted into Slytherin none-the-less.

So here I was in the most pureblooded and prejudiced house in the entire school, and I wasn't sure it was going to be significantly better than Scyon. I was not far from correct. Draco Malfoy chose to be the first person to speculate about my geneology and the taint in my blood that must obviously show on my skin.

I broke his nose.

That was when I realized, however, that there was one thing about Hogwarts which was, indeed, much different from Scyon: Professor Snape.

In one swoop of billowing, black robes, he punished me.

But, he saw me flinch as he advanced on me with those harsh, black eyes, even though he had no intentions of hitting me. How was I to know that? Should I have expected something else given my history?

He also saw, in my very open eyes as he used Legilimency on me, that Malfoy had indeed targeted me for no good reason.

He gave me two months of detention and put me on restriction for the entire term. I didn't know it then, but those two months of detention gave me my chance to make an impression. I would have to prepare his ingredients for him every night.

Then, after informing me of my punishment, hedid the one thing I never would have anticipated anyone doing...he had a little talk with Malfoy to guarantee that the boy wouldn't come picking on me about my bloodlines ever again.

"Blood tests are given at Scyon Academy, and I guarantee you that his 15 generations of pureblood are much greater than your 12. I suggest you don't put your nose in other people's business, especially not those of your own house. What is more, that boy could make a very easy job of you indeed, and I wouldn't want him to make you the target that will get him expelled from his second school."

He did the one thing that no one else ever did for me in my entire life - he gave me a chance and believed me when I told him that Malfoy had baited me. He stood up for me despite my colorful record from Scyon. Before you start thinking him to be benevolent in any fashion...not for one small moment did he ever waiver on his choice of punishment for me or even deign to be congenial.

I didn't realize it then, but he won my respect and loyalty in that moment. He might have punished me for what I did to Malfoy, for my impulsivity clouding my intellect as it were, but he also took care of the split in my lip that Goyle had inflicted. He didn't treat me differently than any other student because of my last name or lack thereof.Myrespect and loyaltyonly grew exponentially after.

I hadn't known that I was looking for protection after so many years of experiencing pain that wasn't my due, but I suppose I was. In retrospect it seems that way.

So why the fire, why the anger, you might ask? Well all good things give way to bad and the cycle starts over again.

The irony continues, I suppose.

The beginning of my plunge back into firey hell happened on cold night in December when Professor Snape came back in a very sorry state from a Death Eater gathering. I was apprenticed to him by now.

Ultimately, now that I had some modicum of stability and some taste of real life, I was the one that was asked to protect his life.

Sickeningly funny, right? When I was younger, I was the one punished for defending myself. Now, just of age, I was asked to protect my Master's life by sacrificing my freedom, future, and well-being, when _he_ was the one who strove to protect my life and my future in the first place.

Irony.

He hadn't wanted to apprentice me because of this association with the Dark Lord - his dangerous status as a spy. Being his apprentice could bring me to the same end. But, he had feared that refusing me would cause me to desperately seek help elsewhere - from the Dark Lord. Two choices he could make and he saw both likely leading to the same end.

I would never have willingly gone over to the Dark Lord. He couldn't have known that though.

He said yes to apprenticing me, so the reason did not matter.

His initial reservation was right too, as I am sure you have anticipated, based upon his return from that Death Eater gathering. The Dark Lord wanted my Master to being me to him - wanted another skilled in potions. The ultimatum was given: "Bring me the boy, Severus, or I will further question your loyalties. Bring the boy or die."

He came back to Dumbledore and refused to order me to do it. He refused to even ask it of me.

He would not trade my pain for his life, or extension thereof.

Ironic that his desire for me not to go with him to the Dark Lord made it impossible for me not to go with him to the Dark Lord.

He had my trust and my respect, but until that moment I did not know that I also had his. I suppose I am much more loyal than your average Slytherin. But, Professor Snape and I are kindred, even if neither acts it nor admits it. We are both druids afterall.

Ironic that the man that had saved me from so much physical pain would again sentence me to such pain - to more torturous pain even. Physical and psychological.

Ironic that he had to treat me nearly as badly as the professor at Scyon I so hated. He smacked me. He beat me. He used the Cruciatus on me. He broke me again and triedhishardest to douse the fire of anger, and he succeeded as best he could. I cowered from him in those moments. I still do sometimes.

He had to do it, though, in order to train me so that I would not betray us both to the Dark Lord. We had to create memories of him being the cruel Master the Dark Lord would expect him to be. Those were the memories I was to push forward as truth when I was occluding the Dark Lord.

I have two personas now, like Professor Snape does, but the two of mine are not like the two of his. One of his is stoical, contemplative, and strict, but fair. The other is of a merciless Death Eater that cares nothing of things other than power or subservience. My Master can separate the two personas within himself...can change from one to the other at the drop of a pin and not be influenced by the dormant one.

My personas? One is the real me - strong, academic, loyal, sarcastic, and vindictive. The other persona is that of myself shattered like a mirror. I am forced to be obsequious and to wear an emotional and physical mask.

Slowly I am turning into the second persona - the one that was supposed to be an act. It is more and more difficult to find myself. I cannot take off the mask as he does.

The fire is going out, or rather the fire itself is burning cold. The embers are still hot, and the flames can flare up when fueled, but it feels cold inside. It feels cold right down to my very magical core. The anger is cold, because it is slowly turning to hate and emptiness. Hatred of the wrongs of the world and my place in it. I know it will happen to me. I know that in hiding and controlling my emotions and reactions, I am losing touch with them completely. I see what I will be like in 20 years everyday. I am apprenticed to my aged counterpart. The old saying, 'Like Master, like man.'

He did not want his life for me. He told me so when he tried, in vain, to discourage me from accompanying him to that first, fated meeting.

That was the sacrifice I made to save my Master's life. There were more reasons that than, but that is ultimately the way that I feel.

Feel?

I say Master without any reservations. I could not have asked for a better mentor. It was painful, and continues to be, but he taught me everything he knew.

He taught me how to survive.

As a druid, I should not be surprised with the irony or even with the cyclical nature of things. You can escape something only momentarily before it will eventually come back to you or you to it. You can escape pain, but will come back to it. You can be given a future, but then must choose to sacrifice it. I have used the word ironic a lot, but I will use it at least two more times yet.

Ironic that the man who gave me a future, was the Master that I gave that future away for. Perhaps I will get it back again. Cyclical, you see?

I said that in time I would turn into that second persona, but it is even difficult for me to realize how much I have been defeated, broken. How much I really have sacrificed.

Ironic that even now the fire burns cold.

I write this because I cannot yell, or scream in pain, or defy, or even say out loud what I am going through to the man who is supposed to be my mentor.

He would understand, rationally I know, because he has gone through the selfsame thing. I cannot bring myself to speak such things to him at this moment, because the act has taken over my real existence.

The fire burns cold, indeed.

Signed, Osiris Silver


	2. What I Am

The Diary of Osiris Silver

What I am.

All at once a very loaded thought and a very difficult explanation. The easy answer would be that nobody really knows or understands in its entirety.

The answer most get is that I am a pureblood who hasn't the slightest idea of my genealogy. My last name a lie to protect me and my family, apparently.

The answer the most privileged get is that I am a druid, what would be considered the pinnacle of pureblooded wizardry. But, we are fundamentally different. Our bloodlines, different. Our powers, different. Our possibilities...well, far more infinite than your usual wizard.

The REAL answer? I have never told a soul.

Until Professor Snape.

Until I almost attacked him and drained him of his entire life force.

He thought I was a vampyre! If it were simply that easy, or rather simply that easy to explain. The truth? I am not completely of this world. When you work with the Dark Arts, it is not without personal consequence. There are dangers. Danger my 'family' knows quite well, even if I know nothing of them. If we make a portal, they (dark forces/creatures/what have you) can come into our world through us. It would be rather silly to think it didn't work the other way around.

Vampyres in our world were created by symbiotic parasites (for a lack of better terminology) that infested them during Dark practices. A mistake most can prevent now, but not then because they weren't aware. Those symbiotic parasites travel in the fluids of the vampyre and are transmitted through bite and then through the drinking of the vampyre's blood. That any wizard knows.

I am not a vampyre. I was bitten by nothing. I drank nothing. I was infested by nothing.

I am told, and there has obviously been a lot of deception in my family, so I say this quite loosely. I am told that my grandmother, an Egyptian witch of remarkable talent, was one who made the jump into another dimensional plane, effectively apparated (I suppose) straight through the pentagramal portal on the floor.

One might think that other planes have strange creatures, frightening creatures. I suppose that is true of some, or else Dark Arts wouldn't be quite so...Dark. Apparently there are humanoid creatures there too, not at all that unlike us.

Perhaps that is just me trying to feel optimistic about my abyssmal situation.

The point?

She did not come back alone. She came back pregnant.

My mother was normal by all standards, just as normal as I. You could not look and know that there was anything wrong, but my 'family' would not allow this 'mistake' to corrupt our line or that of another pureblood Egyptian family. So, she was married to a part-Egyptian man, another pureblood, of good family, but I would know nothing of that.

Of course.

Nothing.

I do not know what makes me different other than blood affects me quite strangely, and my affinity and ability in the Dark Arts is intuitive, not learned. I don't need a wand to use them, focus them, because I am not using something that is not of my own world. You see? Because I belong to more than one. I have not gone there, nor would I ever deign to or wish to. I can use the Dark Arts and control them because they are a part of me, or my genetics, of my (ha!) blood.

Speaking of blood. I do not crave it or need it. My body just simply seems to like it or want it like a normal child would want chocolate or like an addict would want heroin. The smell of it from another will link me to that person, make me sense their heartbeat and feel it within me. Like legilimency for blood instead of thoughts and the mind.

I should perhaps be more honest with myself about the scope and magnitude of this...facet of my magic...facet of me...It is not so simplistic. Nor is it wholly unuseful, even if I have no desire to use it, nor even understand how I would go about using it...I suppose it is not completely unlike some talents or afflictions a vampyre might have.

I digress.

To be sure, blood will save me from most fates, fix most of my wounds, which I know only now but I had heard through my mum. I believe it would save me from death. It would be easy to see a similarity to a vampyre. There are similarities. I just don't have any afflictions or symbiotic relationship nonsense. It IS me. I AM it. One quarter of me at least.

In that moment when Professor Snape's blood went in my mouth, it awakened that part of me. It is like a sickness that makes me incapable of focusing on anything other than the blood. It is like an addiction that I have done nothing to have. I have never, ever sampled someone's blood. Not of my own accord. The Professor's was the first to ever grace my lips and judging by what happened, I do not wish to experience it again. I could not control my desire for it. I could have killed him, I think. The deprivation of that blood I tasted was like a pain I have never felt. Not even from the Dark Lord.

I made my confession to my Master. I should have made it to him previously, but who would want to speak of such things. Who would not want to simply ignore them. It had never been a problem before, why would it be now? I had so much to lose by speaking. I had never had anything to lose before, well, in recent memory.

I should have told him. The betrayal in his eyes. The lack of sympathy. The anger.

And for the first time in my short life, I begged. My shirt stained with my own blood, blood that I had spilled for him, to save his life. I begged for him to keep my secret, on my knees, I begged. I begged him to forgive my silence.

He looked at me with those black eyes, his face whiter than usual from the exertion and stress of the night. He looked at me for a good long time. He invaded my mind and I let him. No blocks, no walls, no pushing anything forward. He searched for any sign that I had ever killed someone. All he found was my mother.

He turned and walked away, the door closing resolutely behind him. I didn't run, I didn't move, I couldn't. Those small cuts might have healed, but my body was still mangled with magic, teeming with Dark Arts, and I was sick. Very, very sick. And my gashes were still the fonts of a good deal of blood.

When I looked down at my arms all I saw was white and blood and blue, blue veins streaking all the way up my arms. When I looked at myself later in the mirror, I saw them going up my neck and halfway up my cheeks, making me look dead, making me look like an inferius.

When the door opened again, my eyes were closed, still sitting huddled in the corner on the floor. I expected Dumbledore. That man that had no issues sending me to my death. Perhaps he would yet get another chance. A welcomed chance now. I was broken. I was discarded. I had the torment of what I had lost and the knowledge that I could live such emptiness for an entire lifetime. Who would want that?

I was ready. I had already tried to will my own breathing away. Failed, obviously.

My expectation of Dumbledore was a betrayal of the man that had given me more than any other. I should not have been so ready to think the worst of him.

It was Professor Snape. Alone.

And in that moment, I found an acceptance I had never known before. He nodded at me and then asked if he could help me now.

He knelt by my side and wordlessly began doing all manner of detection spells and healing spells.

When he took my arm that the Dark Lord nearly splatter in half with his cutting spell, I turned my wrist and held his forearm between my cold fingers. Our eyes locked.

I had not felt fear in a long time. I had not felt it a long time before my mother died, only briefly when I had to kill her, and never again after.

Until Professor Snape.

And as I held his arm and we looked at each other I told him I had no fear of non-existence, of death. It is much easier to fear living a life of torturous emptiness for a lifetime. For a long time I had nothing to lose.

I would never be afraid of death. I was not afraid of death. I will never be afraid of death.

What I could not stomach was the thought of what he had given me and then losing it, but still being alive to experience daily the torture of its loss.

In having something to live for, I had gained something to fear.

That is why I was afraid of his judgement, afraid of telling him, while I did not particularly experience fear even at the Meeting.

He gave me something to fear and then in accepting me in that moment, he took my ability to fear once again. I could not lose what he had given me already, that I saw in his endless, supposedly emotionless, black eyes. I didn't need Legilimency to see it.

I was not prepared for his admission that followed.

I was not prepared to hear that he only had memories to live for. That what he lived for was to make it so those he had cared about and lived for had not died in vain.

Living for a memory could not be so much different than living in torturous emptiness for an entire lifetime, which I so feared. It was all about what was and could never be again.

And when I looked down and released his arm to allow him to continue on, I knew that was as close as I would ever get to understanding how long it had been since someone had made any sacrifices for him even though he had made sacrifices for memories every day of his life.

In his life of bitter memories, of the death of happiness, nobody had cared. Nobody had understood. Nobody had ever been that devoid of fear.

Nobody but me.

It wouldn't have mattered what I was.

It does not matter what I am.

And the Fire Burns Cold...

But the fire still burns.

Signed, Osiris Silver


End file.
